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What are your thoughts toward COTEC?; For the future please post!!
Topic Started: Aug 29 2006, 08:13 PM (2,153 Views)
S'tan
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Exalted Guardian
ok, sounds cool. maybe some people, that are already active in such forums could do that (so you don't just sign up and say '' 'sup ppl come to cotec'' and that's your only post there).
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Narmo Eressea
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Aspirant to Anar´s favour.
What I would like more to see is the Everchosen search for the treasures.

More or less I support Mistreás points, and I also think we have a lot of projects ongoing at the same time and that we would focus in one or two.
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The Bearer
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Lord of COTEC

This is all great and productive stuff guys keep it up. It is also a great hear that many of the suggestions and opinions have already been taken into account by Administration and something is being done about it :)

What I would like to hear more of is what you think about the forum itself. What feelings do you have when you come to COTEC compared to when to you go elsewhere. What makes it unique, the reasons why you choose to come here over other forums, or if you go to ther forums - what makes them so good.

Its the honestly factor, however brutal, that Im searching for because it is these kind of discussions that will push COTEC forward.
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acolite
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O.K. time to get the thinking cap on.

IMHO lots of communities act in different way, and COTEC has its own style, like many.

UE is quite a 'family' forum, in more ways then one. First off, its a cohesive whole, and the members look out for each other, like the Mafia style 'Family'.

Yet it is also very inter-related, as many of the active members are either related by blood, partnership, or RL friendship.

Therefore becoming part of UE's community is a bit like becoming a 'brother in law', kind of like being intergrated to a different family which you then grow to class as your own.


IMHO COTEC does not possess that, but that does not mean that COTEC is lacking it, it just 'works' in a different way.

I found the majority of people that I now class as strong friends at COTEC... people like Mistrea, Stratos, Marixis et al who I have kept in contact with. Yes, Saga of Shadow was very importantant with this, but I still met them a long time ago here, at COTEC (well, COTEC1, but you get the point ;) )

So I guess I've always classed COTEC as a group of friends, rather then a family. Yes, close friends that I feel connected to, but rather with that 'friend' element, the kind of polite acceptance and appreciation, rather then the bonds that some forums have.

Once again I'm not saying this is bad, its just... different. We will be polite and will look out for each other as friends... as a true community should.


I've always really seen COTEC as my ancestral 'home' forum, being the first forum I joined from the SoC boards (I can still remember not having a clue who 'COTEC' was, until another confused n00b made a post asking 'So what IS COTEC anyway?'. My reaction at seeing the title was "about bloody time! lets take a look in here then..." and the rest is history.


I think another strength of COTEC is the respect factor. When i was a wee n00b, I had great respect for people like Bearer, Stratos, and Lightbringer. Frankly, I thought they were the closest you could get to god on a forum :P . Maybe this was becuase I was a young lad just gone 13, but the 2 years have really changed my outlook.


I now deeply respect the afore mentioned three (and others) for the awesome things they can do, rather then just who they are.

I'm not saying I've lost that respect guys ;) , I'm just saying that now I'm 'on a par' with you, it feels very different to how I was as a COTEC n00b.


I notice that I talk quite a bit about 'how it was when I was only 13 years old' and I know that its quite niave, as now I'm only 15 years old!
But I do this becuase in RL those two years really changed my life a lot and defined the person that I am now, and quite ironically that was exactly when I was introduced to forum surfing, so forums such as COTEC have played a very strong part of 'becoming me' (much to my parents exhasperation!)


Also, I'm very impressed by the level of quality here. I kind of breezed through for a long time without noticing that actually there is a lot of talent on the internet!

I mean looks at Bearer's purely awesome graphics design for LoA, to take but one example! It really blew all the LoA Devs away. The best thing was that he came back after quite a long absense and brought with him one or two previews of the map for us Devs, and I was just speechless, as all I had seen was GW's 'hand drawn' style dealios and the animostiy maps (or was that after LoA, I forget!)

IMHO one of my biggest annoyances is not being able to read all the fluff here. That is due to a time limit imposed on my computer use by my parents, as if I had free reign I would just spend hours here reading, and get no schoolwork done!

When I can I take the opportunity to read the peices which concern what I'm doing closely, but sadly as I said, that is not often enough!

This will be remadied by something coming in due course... but i'm pretty sure I should shut up now, as I think it may be all hush hush ;) .


now where was I... oh yes, quality;

Its not only the quality of work that impressed me, but also that of character.

I imagine most, if not all of you are familiar with this thread, and as well as others over the course of COTEC's history it does exemplify that we are very caring and freindly people who generally will help you in real life as well as on the table top.

The reason I love forums so much is that I find people don't care what you wear, whether you have a rubbish hair cut, or if you aren't that good academically, to name but a few image relating things, the thing that matters is what your character is like.

People say the majority of communication is subliminal, and requires to to be in contact with the other person in some manner, but I'm not sure thats wholly true. You can build up a good idea of what the people on the other end of the high speed connection are like.

Sure, its incredibly easy to fabricate a personality, but truthfully I don't believe anyone here is or would. Once again, maybe its becuase I'm too naive ;) .

Anywho, I'm digressing a lot now, so lets round this up shall we:

THINGS WE NEED TO KEEP

1) The strong frienship and helpfull ness of the community here - I want that to continue, even when we expand.

1.5) the quality of personality here, and the level of mutual politeness. I really want to see this continue, as it makrs COTEC out as a really nice place to be.

2) The respect people have for what each other can or can't do.

3) The level of quality work that people here can produce.

4) the willingness to work. I did not bring it up before, but it just occured to me now; when it comes round to it the forum as a whole is very prepared to pull its weight.


THINGS WE (MIGHT) NEED TO WORK ON

1) COTEC's image as a whole. Although not bad, I sometimes get the feeling that COTEC doesn't possess the independant and cohesive image that the other large forums do, such as D.net, Da Warpath, and UE.

I think what we're doing now will help to remedy this.

Its just that sometimes our agreeablility and politness makes as slightly too... bland? no, thats not really the word... more lacking some of the characterism that make up a strongly identifiable forum.

But as I said, I think we are already moving to remedy this.
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end of mankind
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Clanlord
That's quite the rant there Acolite ;) And still you're telling us you don't have enough time to read all the fluff around here? :P

Ok, so my feelings towards CotEC, and why I do keep returning here, and not to other places.

As I made clear in the last sentence, CotEC is the only warhammer forum I just keep going back to. Sure, I sometimes visit the Blood Keep, Warhammer-Empire or Asur.org, and at times I do visit it regularly (sometimes even daily), but sooner or later I loose interest, and don't visit it for a couple of months. For one reason or another, this doesn't happen to CotEC. I myself am not entirely sure as to why that is, but it happens! Sometimes people say: 'your first love will stay with you forever', and I think this is the case with me too. I just can't leave this place!

The problem I'm facing now in describing why cotec is so much better then other places, is that there is only a single word I can use to describe it, but sadly that word doesn't translate into English.. For those who speak Dutch, or a little bit of German, the word I mean is ofcourse 'gezellig', or 'gemütlich' in German.

I think the best way to translate it is a mix between cosy and having fun. The people here are all very nice, when asking help you will always get it, and the good thing is we all know eachother pretty well. This means that you can make fun of somebody else, without really offending that person. I think if I would say some of the things I've said here on some other forum, people might take it personally and get angry with me. Here, I view mostly every single one of you as a friend. Sometimes I get the feeling I'm leading two lives, one in Real Life, where I ofcourse have my friends and stuff, but the other one is online, and at that mainly here, on CotEC.

All in all I feel that is the strength of this community, we all know eachother pretty well, and that makes for a pretty tight relationship between us all. Now, in some forums, this might lead to a problem, because new members might feel left out. However, I think our forum is pretty good at accepting new members, and making them feel part of the group (one of the newer people may correct me if I'm wrong here) really fast.

So, quick summary: the main thing is we are just like a close group of friends, rather then a bunch of guys who accidentaly met eachother on the internet.
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acolite
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@EoM: :P as it happens I'm about to be forced off the computer any minute :D .


also, I just went out to make a cup of tea (I'm British I have an excuse!) and realised something:


We're asking the active member why they remain active...

...surely we should also be asking the inactive ones why they are inactive!


I mean, otherwise surely our data is biased!


How we could do this I have no idea, but I also noticed the people that are replying are the very active and settled members, who are unlikely to see things through the eyes of a newcomer, so as EoM touched upon, it would also be beneficial to ask our newer members what they think of the forum as a first impression and nearly-outsider.
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Bloodfist
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Ogre Ambassador
Well as a newcomer I can try to give some feedback.

I have to agree with EoM in the way that all you guys are very friendly and easy-going. I felt right at home. I havn't visited a lot of forums apart from the Stronghold and the Twighlight Wars and that's becouse I just recently have internet acces.

I find COTEC to be a relatively small community compared to other forums, with only about a dozen regulars each day, but that is not nessecarily a bad thing. It is obvious you guys go way back and are considering each other as friends.
I've been aboard for just a few weeks now and I even made some friends here and that is just grand.

The downside is that with only 'a few' people posting regularly, my hunger for communication isn't stilled. I visit the site maybe 15 times a day now and it has become quite addictive.

I especially enjoy the CAoD and hope that gets more developed over time. The team-ups is a great idea and a more RPG-like approach might also be interesting.
Anyway, I like the site a lot and will be here to stay (if you like that or not ;) )

Cheers, Bert
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Lightbringer
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Evil Wizards Inc.
Quote:
 
I'm not saying I've lost that respect guys  , I'm just saying that now I'm 'on a par' with you

Pfft, dream on :P

- I mean position wise, I'll never be as good as you LB, your a legend! :D - acolite

Okay, lets be serious for a moment. I think EoM summed it up quite well, the word exists in Swedish as well so I got it. I think the best English word for it would be "cozy", although still not dull. This is our main strengths.

Our second strength is our project, there is always something going on here like the Caod and the Malal and Lagoth projects. However, this is also our main weakness imo. We tend to do to many things at one time, and this sooner or later leads to some of the things slipping away. That isn't very good and can give a bit of a bad image if it "gets out". Like the Malal project, when was there a post about that last?

Cotec is good at project, and that is something we should keep doing imo, but we should stop trying to do everything at once at concentrate a bit more if we actually want to accomplish anything ;)
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snyggejygge
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High Zar of Khorne

There will be a sort of RPG game w. the CAOD as we will have the Everchosen CAOD campaign, so hopefully it will satisfy you ;)

My feelings towards COTEC:

What I like & feel should stay when (if) we expand:

I like the firendship we have & as others have said even new members are very welcome & I accept everybody, both new members & guys who have been here since the beginning. This is a very important aspect imo.

CAOD: This is really great, i haven´t played or umpired many games myself 8about 5 or 6), but man those have been of great fun, this I see can be something of our trademark.

The personal feelings: In the first 2 campaigns we had, i always enjoyed how very personal it got, not in a bad way, there were small grudges, heroic tales & our fluff actually meant something as the best stuff was incorperated into the dark Tome, I really loved this & no one was ever left out, making it a lot more personal & enjoyable.

The quality over quantity!: I like that we really don´t have any spammers (well Aco & Mistrea of lately, but not so it disturbs you), this means that every post made, even if not as many as on other forums, actually is worth reading.

What I would like to see:

More articles: I know I´ve said this before, but a few articles on the mainpage, this could be anything about tactics, how to paint an army etc etc. it would make the site look more dedicated & i know there are a lot of members here willing to do it!

A campaign as good as the first ones: No need to explain now is there ^_^

More pics: I know this is the members fault, but I just love to see pics of other peoples models, sadly we don´t have as many as many other forums (perhaps we could have the members pics oon the mainsite like the daemonic legion)...

Finalize our projects: We have lots of projects going on, but we need to finish them, I will myself try & finish the Malal project as soon as i have the time, but i need more playtesters & someone who can do a PDF of the final result.
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Mistrea
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Deus ex machina
Wow, great posts from everyone!

Ok i agree with you all completely regarding the friendly, warm atmosphere. According to my translator 'gezellig' means sociable, but yeah my translator sucks and as we all know languages don't translate perfectly. Anyway i think the best way to describe it is 'steady' or long term friendliness, even slow paced to some extent if you get what i mean. It really is hard to explain.

And yes, there probably are only a dozen members who come on daily and 20-30 more who you will see every week, then a bunch more who come monthly or so. I have noticed recently that a *lot* of new members have join and more specifically old member s have returned (Maraxis, Malakess, Veln etc) This is great and IMO due to the rise in project activity. I really think are project surge can make something great of COTEC. Saying this i also agree with LB.

The website is obviously Bearers and the web teams job, however LoA as a whole is the communities job and i think we need a rough launch date even if it is fairly inaccurate. It gives us some thing to work towards and would really help us Lagothian DEVs :P
Project Malal should defiantly be done too, snyggejygge seems to have this in hand.
The CaoD. It is a *huge* asset and i tink we should maximize it, i would even suggest some kind of connection with rezephua. I think some how we could work together for the greater good, i am not exactly sure how though. Rezephua is a great site and community and i think some more association would be good, me and Kormak seem to have become regulars there, i for one really enjoy it although i have not come close to winning an AoD yet :)

I think the CaoD should be the biggest focus until it's LoA time, it is something completely unique. We could in the future run an inter site CoaD, *if* and of course it is an if we got Rezephua interested and associated with us, together we could do something of insane proportions that would include every major Warhammer forum. This would be great and would bring scores of new membership.

Brown is a great CaoD leader, however i think some work still needs to be done on the rules, mainly making them look more cohesive and rewording some of them. i also think the CaoD project team need to do more in this, as (and i am being honest) i have seen very little work done from either Stratos or Beaver in this department. I don't know why this is but i really think the CaoD team is three very talented, skilled and knowledgeable people, who could make CaoD very good.

As i have previously mentioned i agree 100% with snyggejygge about articles etc, and again i will say i would be willing to compile a tactical topic index with links to all the best tactical discussions we have had.

Quote:
 
well Aco & Mistrea of lately


It isn't spamming if your post contributes something, i like to think the majority of mine do :P
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Xintikki
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Warrior of the Chamber
Quote:
 
ok, sounds cool. maybe some people, that are already active in such forums could do that (so you don't just sign up and say '' 'sup ppl come to cotec'' and that's your only post there).


I can tell about this site in The Pyramid Vault, Most, but not all are Lizardmen players though. But for instance, they play quite a lot own created RPG's there.
I am still anewer member there as I joined the Vault at the start of the Twilight Campaign (under the same name)

Also keep placing links to this site to recuit participants for CAoD's and the like
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acolite
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1st off:

Quote:
 
well Aco & Mistrea of lately


Not that I'm defending myself for the sake of it, but we do not spam per se, as imo the large majority of our posts, if not all, have related substance, its just the sever volume and pace that we post at.

Yes, it does make it more difficult for others sometimes (o.k. quite a lot of the time), but what we post is worth somehting. We also conduct ourselves in a very appreciative manner :P .

So therefor I would class it as sever activity rather then spam.


Mind you, in balance, we do have a tendancy to slide things OT due to the almost conversation like use of posting. But I can admit and see this, and with my mod privs am happy to split my own posts of into the OT forum if they're getting out of hand.



Our high activity is just something we have to live with if you want our gifts :D .


Anyway, THIS is OT, so I'll shut it, and as always, if you want to keep discussing it, I'm happy to split this into another topic.



I think Mistrea touched upon something very important for the advancement with COTEC:

Outreach.

IMHO it is vital that we work with other forums and organisations, as it creates mutual benefit, and centralises the community as a whole (centralises is not really the right word... more 'makes people more in touch with each other')

I do not know the other admins views on this, but I think that when/if we organise an ambassador plan, we should really try to widen COTEC outreach plans, as we are somewhat 'localised' here (Just don't think of League of Gentlemen, eh? :P ).

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Lord Marixis
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Rise from the Ashes
acolite
Aug 30 2006, 12:27 PM
1) COTEC's image as a whole. Although not bad, I sometimes get the feeling that COTEC doesn't possess the independant and cohesive image that the other large forums do, such as D.net, Da Warpath, and UE.

I was thinking of saying this, but acolite beat me to it. I certainly got this feeling during the Twilight War campaign, especially during the fluff discussions. All of the "big" forums (Druchii.net, UE, Stronghold, Herdstone, etc.) had excellent representation, and I (along with others) noticed that Chaos was being treated...how should I put this..."second-rate", if you will. Not that we were left out, but as a whole Chaos' opinions didn't carry as much weight as other races'. The problem being, of course, that COTEC just isn't well known enough. Sure, we were big during SoC, but that was two years ago. Many people have either forgotten about us or don't know we exist. Establishing a solid presence in the online community should be one of our top priorities (and it looks like we have the beginnings of a plan.)

Quote:
 
(Just don't think of League of Gentlemen, eh?  ).

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, acolite. Who can beat Sean Connery, eh? :P

And I completely agree with everyones' views on COTEC's atmosphere - it is warm and friendly, and the people here can take a joke without getting too offended.

Quote:
 
Quote:
 
I'm not saying I've lost that respect guys  , I'm just saying that now I'm 'on a par' with you



Pfft, dream on

- I mean position wise, I'll never be as good as you LB, your a legend! - acolite

^This is exactly what I am talking about. In other places, people might've gotten irritated/annoyed. But here, LB and acolite just laugh it off. ;)
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kerill
Exalted Guardian
Well I only found this site due to the herdstone link. The herdstone is still by far my preference even though I play mortals far more than beasts. The reasons for this are:

1) The community here is too small

2) As a result there seems to be few responses to posts

3) Their site design is better- I really think the "warhammer forums" part should be at the top and the general and other games bits at the bottom. The colour scheme, post counts and other graphics on this forum are great but the basics need a bit of fiddling with. I think I might have clicked onto this forum a long time ago but didn't see anything of interest in the forum (because I clicked on the general forum at the top).

Other than that the people here seem to be as pleasant and knowlegdeable as the herdstone, just there are fewer people. There are also a few cool projects (e.g. Malal) on here but there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress lately.

A second big draw for people are useful threads on tactics and hobbying. Snygg seems to have put two decent articles in the tactics section but there is very little else there. Start some new threads with all the mods joining in, anyone can post and the thread starter updates the front pages.

Snother good thing at the herstone in this regard are the enemy spotlights (would be even better if they were compiled into army spotlights).

Other things that would be cool include an "army list of the week/month"- basically put up an army list for critique (or choose one that someone has posted) and put an in depth analysis of it in including tactics against army X and so on.

For hobbying maybe put in some articles for how to make an X. For example how to make alternative knights/cragon ogres/screamers/minotaurs/war mammoth/centigors/chariots and so on. Maybe have a hobby sticky for "Ideas for a Chaotic Budget" with different ways to increase your army while saving money/making it look cooler.

Maybe put up some other rules (e.g. campaign rules, rules for mighty empires) that kind of thing. I'm happy to contribute stuff I've done before.

The last thing is to make sure more people know about it- I discovered the herdstone as a result of a post on warseer/portent, but I've never read a post mentioning this website- that could be changed very easily, especially if you get one of the cooler projects finished (e-zine or Malal list for example).

Put simply you need to make sure that there is more here than on warseer so that this is always a mortals first choice for warhammer site. As it is I would post a mortals list on warseer or even the herdstone to get some comments- that needs to change and its the mods who can do this as the community grows.

Good luck with the site anyway, I'll keep coming back to it :)
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Time of Madness
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The Chosen
Nice post kerill.

The biggest thing for me when I visit different boards is seeing a dedicated mod/admin team contributing daily to boards. This is something that COTEC has being lacking recently. And unfortunately because of this I think COTEC has gone a little dorment compare to times in the passed.

Once the website is back up and running and the board cleaned up a bit I think you will start to see a bit of a re-birth around here. Especially with the upcoming chaos 7th ed book.

It'd be nice to get everything in place over the next year before the book is released.

Also in the long run I'd love to see the boards move to PPHBB as they are definitly more user friendly and give a ton of advantages.

All in all you'll see me around this place on a daily basis for a long while as my undivided list continues to grow.
Time of Madness
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